Finland: Where second-hand comes first

With her daughter and baby son, Kati Rossi is prowling a suburb of Helsinki in the hunt for a second-hand bookshelf.

Across the road looms a Swedish furniture giant, but Kati is scouring a huge municipal re-use centre instead.

“I don’t want to go to IKEA,” she tells me. “I will find something much more interesting here, and much more original.

“I don’t want to have the same furniture as everyone else. What I buy here will be a fraction of the price and better for the planet.”

As concern grows about the resources we’re using and the CO2 that is producing our goods, does this place hold lessons for the world?

It is one of a network of giant non-profit re-use stores in Finland.

Not the regular sort of second-hand or thrift stores you find on the High Street, but giant supermarkets named Kierrätyskeskus.

Bringing clothes and buying clothes

Image caption
Hannamarie Johansson and Pinja Lauria were browsing together

The centres repair electrical goods, upcycle some items with their own brand label, and they even have a digital personal shopper – a smart app which predicts the items you’ll want based on previous purchases.

In the furniture section, two friends on a day off from the office are browsing together.

Hannamarie Johansson) tells me: “I’m looking for new clothes for my new job.

“I bring clothes that I don’t use any more. You bring something and buy something.”

Pinja Lauria says: “I really like these places. I used to live in Luxembourg where they have second-hand shops – but not like this.

“They just had clothes and books, not furniture. I’m looking for new tables today.”

UK postcode lottery

She complains that in the UK there is a postcode lottery on re-using goods.

Some local councils encourage people to take items from recycling dumps – but others forbid it, often on grounds of health and safety and liability.

“We have got to try much harder on this agenda,” she tells me.

“So much good material is going to waste.”

Will Gove spark re-use revolution?

In north Yorkshire, for instance, Jim Aldridge took a lawnmower to dump at the local tip. Another customer asked him if he could take it.

“But,” he said, “The employee at the tip said we would both have to drive off the site to hand the mower over.

“If we did it on site it was considered to be trading – which was not allowed.

“He said once the goods left my car boot they became the property of the council. It’s a bit daft.”

Is this about to change? The UK Environment Secretary Michael Gove will produce a new waste and resources strategy in coming weeks.

He recently said: “We must reduce the amount of material we waste. It’s not an answer to everything but greater reuse is one way to ensure that pressure on resources diminishes. Resource efficiency is good for the economy.”

Will he deliver on these words?

Politicians everywhere are under increasing pressure to re-use resources.

The pressure group RREUSE has a simple slogan – it is time to put second-hand first.

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